State Wise Solar PV Installation

SOLAR PV INSTALLATION BY STATE

India installed over 40 GW of Solar PV installations as of March 2021 as per MNRE physical achievement page. Karnataka, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh were the top state who have installed grid-connected utility-scale projects of above 4 GW. The top six states under the utility scale cover 78% of the total installed capacity of 35.6 GW. The top ten states installed a cumulative capacity of 37.5 GW (both utilityscale & rooftop) and cover a market share of more than 93.7% by the end of 31st Mar 2021.

Due to Covid lockdown across different parts of the country, many of the utility-scale projects which were supposed to be installed in the first quarter of 2021, has moved to the next few quarters, as the lockdown was continued in the second quarter of 2021. Even for rooftop installation, many big corporate and business units were closed due to lockdown restriction, which was impacted the installations, again installers who have done OPEX projects were not able to get the payment during the lockdown, which is again affecting their daily operations or working capital shortage. This reason forces the installers to raise short-term loans from the market for the smoothly functioning of their offices and to maintain their administrative expenses. As this Covid lockdown restriction is creating lots of uncertainty in the market, many rooftop installers were not doing any projects for the past one and half years since the first lockdown started.

For the utility-scale developers, many of their workers who were doing the constructions work at the site has moved to their hometown in the first wave of Covid lockdown, and due to which the installations in the 2020 calendar year were impacted, again the developers who were able to take care of their workers were able to continue with their construction work and has commissioned the project on time. Even though the government has given five months of blanket extensions last year, and again another extension that has been given this year is impacting the financial position of the developers. The developers have to pay interest during construction (IDC) to their investors, also if they would have commissioned their projects on time, without using government extension, their projects would have been generating money. So, the developers are facing millions of dollars due to their project delays, again the developers who have taken last year extension are facing a rise in the raw materials such as modules price which has increased by 10-15% compared with last year, other balances of system prices have also increased. Now, developers were again asking for an extension either due to the second wave of Covid lockdown or due to an increase in the raw materials price. The government has given extension but only on a case-to-case basis.